Book Reviews
Featured Review
The Tourist.
Olen Steinhauer
New York: Minotaur Books, 2009
I am an espionage novel addict. It began in my early adolescence, when my father—who was a spy, although at the time I didn’t know that—bought me Ian Fleming novels, and, intentionally or inadvertently opened a form of coded communication between us about his clandestine life that it took me nearly 40 years to figure out.
Since then I have read through more novels than I probably ought to admit within the espionage genre, exhausting the usual masters (see my favorites page), occasionally discovering new talent whom I then shadow closely. So it has been my distinct pleasure to lately run into Olen Steinhauer, already an acknowledged master of the cold war espionage novel set in Eastern Europe (and twice a nominee for the Edgar Award), but a writer only recently marketed widely in the States. His newest book, The Tourist, will no doubt establish him at the head of a new class of relatively new espionage authors who came of age as writers after the fall of the Soviet empire, writers who share a symbolic fascination with 9/11 in much the same way as earlier authors paid tribute to the founding of the CIA.
The Tourist features Milo Weaver, a character drawn from a deeply mysterious past who at the outset of this narrative on September 10, 2001, is aboard a jet airplane headed for New York four hours past a suicide attempt and at the end of a failed assassination in Amsterdam. His name in the “tourist” game is Charles Alexander. His real name when he isn’t being a tourist and works behind a desk at the “travel agency”—Milo Weaver—how he got it, and who his mother really was, and why he speaks fluent Russian, and what happened in Amsterdam will all figure into the plot. Got all of that? You have no idea.
Soon we encounter Milo again, this time a few years on, no longer Charles Alexander, supposedly no longer a tourist, and instead playing his dutiful role as an urban dad (to young Stephanie) and husband (to Tina). He is now living as a man who “used to” do field work for the Agency—or so he tells his wife—but since Amsterdam he is just an ordinary desk man. Yeah, right.
Turn a few more pages and we have Milo again, this time in rural Tennessee, on the track of a legendary killer, the very man who foiled Milo’s work in Amsterdam. This bad guy, code name “the Tiger,” is in jail (as it happens, on a trumped up charge of the Tiger’s own devising) but nevertheless is more than willing to tell Milo everything he knows, which feels both narratively correct and somehow just wrong right up until the moment when Tiger bites into a cyanide capsule hidden in his mouth and dies. Milo is blamed for the death—was he set up?—by his bureaucratically-oriented and obviously dangerous boss.
To clear his name, Milo must reenter his old life as the tourist Charles Alexander, retrace his Amsterdam job through the lens of what he learned, or didn’t learn, from Tiger, which brings him to the flat of his longtime colleague and friend, Angela. At least it brings him there for a little while, which is to say only until she dies of a drug overdose immediately after his visit, and once again, he is blamed for a death that was neither his fault nor his doing and that he no way understands. What he does understand is that he must run, not only for his own life, but also to save the lives of Tina and Stephanie and, hopefully, win back their trust.
Enter an old Russian spymaster named Yeveny Primakov, now working for the UN. If you have any heart for this sort of complex, well-told tale, and any appreciation for the old cold war, just the mention of a name like this, and a past like this, and you are more than hooked. And Mr. Steinhauer delivers, right through the last word of the very last sentence on the last page in a way clearly reminiscent of John Le Carre’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.
Wow. Steinhauer has created a memorable and sympathetic—if honestly flawed—character in Milo Weaver, as well as a compelling “quest for the illusive truth of the present day whose roots are in the past” storyline that is the benchmark for a truly classic spy tale of politics, deceit, and ultimately betrayal. Highly recommended.
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